Category: Art

The Chocolate Brown Sketchbook

AFTER THE appropriately aubergine-coloured sketchbook that I used for our week in Greece, I’m starting a new pocket-sized sketchbook for urban excursions. At A6, about 4 x 6 inches, it’s no bigger than a chunky bar of chocolate and it has a chocolate-coloured banana paper cover.

A6 Pink Pig sketchbook

It’s literally a pocket-sized sketchbook and I’m trying to decide what would be the most portable form of colour to go with it.

This morning I took an ArtPen tin loaded with a selection of a dozen watercolour crayons but, for a subject like this anyway, they don’t work as well as watercolours. I try to mix an approximation for the grey of the sky by shading it with the lightest blue and ochre that my small selection of crayons allow.

I don’t find crayons anywhere near as versatile as watercolours. With watercolours you can add the smallest speck of ochre, crimson or blue to a grey mix to get the colour you’re after. You can then add water to get the tone or gradation of tones that you need.

Birdstrike

‘PTOMPH!

It’s happened again; a Goldfinch hits the patio windows and lies senseless on the patio. Luckily by the time we’ve had breakfast it has gradually recovered, looked around and, though we didn’t see it go, flown off.

In the afternoon it’s a Wood Pigeon that hits the window, leaving a dusty outline of its wingspan and a powder puff impression of it’s breast. The Wood Pigeons do this fairly regularly but never seem to come to any harm.

The photograph is the impression of a bird that hit the patio windows 6 weeks ago. You can even see an eye-ring in this picture. It might have been another pigeon but the eye-ring reminds me of a Sparrowhawk.

On the morning that this appeared a smaller impression, perhaps a Goldfinch appeared on the other window.

When you see the two impressions together it looks to me as if both birds hit the window together, the hawk chasing the finch.

In this over-enhanced version you can speculate that the Goldfinch had been on the feeder and the Sparrowhawk had swooped over the hedge. A moment of drama captured in feather impressions.

Kingcups

I’M NOT FINDING pen and Indian ink a responsive medium as I draw these Kingcups by the pond. If I don’t press heavily enough on the paper I don’t get a mark but if I press too hard on the springy nib the pressure builds up for a moment and then – whizz! – the nib sets off and draws a straighter line than I’d intended!

Surely, if I keep at it, I can exercise some relaxed control over the recalcitrant medium. The ink soon goes claggy and even during this short session of drawing I have to pause to clean the coagulating Winsor & Newton black ink from the nib.

Is it the beautifully sunny but not sultry weather that’s drying the ink too quickly or is it the shrill excited scream every five seconds of next door’s children playing happily on a trampoline a few yards away that’s putting me off my stroke?

I think that I’ve been spoilt by the predictably flowing combination of ArtPen and Noodler’s ink. It’s second nature to draw with that combination, but I would like to experiment with different mediums, which create different marks.

Anyway, time to admit defeat, perhaps I’ll add some colour later when it’s a bit quieter!

Black Bag

I’VE DRAWN this in dip pen and Winsor & Newton Indian ink then added a premixed ink wash. I used this method for my High Peak Drifter sketchbook, taking four small plastic containers of pale to dark washes with me.

This proved ideal for subjects in the Dark Peak in late winter and early spring, such as drystone walls and running water and places like Thor’s Cave but as summer approached it seemed wilfully contradictory to use the same monochrome treatment for wild flowers and butterflies. But I stuck with it to the final page, drawn one sultry early summer’s evening at Jacob’s Ladder, the zig-zag path that climbs up to the Kinderscout plateau.

I recently kitted myself out with a fresh batch of Pink Pig cartridge paper sketchbooks in a range of sizes and my plan is to have art-bags ready to go in a small (A6), medium (A5) and largish (A4) sizes.

I’m still looking for a bag that is suitably compact for an A6 sketching kit, perhaps it will all go into a wallet and fit into my pocket. My growing collection of art-bags tend to flop around the studio, usually getting parked on a chair, so I’ve attached a hook to the wall and hung them there, ready to grab one depending on exactly where I’m heading;

  • A National Trust organiser bag in natural canvas is ideal for what I intend to be my natural history sketchbook, an A5 landscape format spiral bound Pink Pig.
  • The black Timberland backpack, a birthday present from a friend last week, is the one that I’d use for more ambitious outings, perhaps to draw whole landscapes rather than smaller details. The bag is designed to hold a laptop, so there’s plenty of room for my A4 landscape format sketchbook and it has extra compartments so that I have the option to include some more ambitious media, dip pen and bottle of ink rather than my habitual fountain pen for instance.
  • Finally, hanging like a shadow behind the National Trust organiser in my sketch, there’s the black shoulder bag (described as a ‘fisherman’s bag’) that I bought at Marks & Spencer’s in Glasgow last year. This is my sketchcrawl around town bag, probably the one that I’ll take most on my errands and book deliveries. This fits my new square 8 by 8 inch holly green Pink Pig like a glove.

But the square page of the holly green sketchbook doesn’t accommodate long thin drawings; that’s why my A5 bag ended up hanging out of frame off the bottom of the page! (Pink Pig do some quirky long thin sizes, perhaps I should go for one of them for tall, thin subjects).

Rubber Stamped


My first attempt at a pen and wash effect using the filters in 'Photoshop'.

MY ILLUSTRATOR friend John Welding was telling me about a science fiction short story from years ago about a world where instead of having to go to the trouble of drawing things artists had only to dial up the appropriate rubber stamp.

That day has arrived because the new version of Photoshop that I’m using includes a stamp filter (left). So much quicker than making your own lino-cut.

Filter Gallery

I’m new to this version of Photoshop so this is the first chance that I’ve had to play around with the Filter Gallery, which is useful as you get instant full size previews of the effects of the filters on offer. By using slider controls you can fine tune the effect.

The Watercolour Filter (left) simplifies the photograph to blocky colour.

To get the effect of a pen and watercolour wash drawing you need to add line. In Photoshop, as with most other image manipulation programs, you do this on a new layer.

Find Edges

This time the filter you need, ‘Find Edges’, doesn’t appear in the Filter Gallery; you’ll find in the Filter Menu under ‘Stylize’.

This gives you rather more than the pure line that you’re after (right), even if you try converting the image to grayscale before you start as I did in this example. There are no slider controls to filter out the tones. You now need to go to . . .

Threshold

To reduce this to pure black and white you need to use the ‘Threshold’ command from the image menu, something I’ve used a lot when scanning my pen and ink artwork when I wanted to print it in line rather than tone.

Just to keep you on your toes, the Threshold command can’t be found amongst the Filters. It’s in the Image menu under Adjustments. Like most of the filters this has a slider control so you can go from almost black to almost washed out.

The ‘pen’ layer, as you might expect, needs to go on top of the ‘watercolour’ layer but to make it transparent you have to set the ‘pen’ layers properties to ‘Multiply’ instead of ‘Normal’ (top).

The finished result wouldn’t convince anybody that I’d used real pen and ink and watercolours but I love that chunky effect and I’d be tempted to use it when I’m painting real watercolours.

Lantern and Leaf

WE CALL at our niece Sarah’s new house in Wakefield and, while chatting over tea and homemade cupcakes, I draw this lantern and leaf.

Just as I’m uploading these sketches back in my studio I catch sight of a silhouette against the blue sky; a Buzzard soars across above me.

That’s the kind of thing that I was hoping that I’d see more of when I moved my computer to this end of the studio by the metre square Velux window in the mansard roof.

I notice that the cock Pheasant has now broken off his bowing and bullying display to a hen Pheasant who was sitting on the plank bench in the corner of my meadow area. He was strutting and bowing on the ground below the bench.

Every year I think that I might get around to doing a decent drawing of the Snowdrops, to start the season as I’d like to go on but, as in previous years, I’ve left it just that little bit too late and they’re already past their best. Those in the shade of the hedge look the freshest.

Put Your Feet Up & Draw

I’ve drawn my left hand so many times while in waiting rooms but drawing my feet is better left until I’m relaxing at home. As I said the other day, I’m enjoying these pen and ink drawings, although here I’m back to ArtPen rather than pen and Indian Ink.

I was taking a look at a Photoshop magazine in the supermarket. Most of the projects don’t appeal to me as they tend to focus on touching up portraits or adding surrealist flourishes to photographs but a step-by-step workshop on turning a photograph of plant pots on greenhouse staging into pen and wash appealed to my both in its subject and its treatment.

Put simply, I gathered as I scanned the pages with no intention of buying the magazine (this is a man thing according to a woman we were talking to the other day), you use a filter that selects edges only then tweak it a bit to give a pen and ink effect and you add a free watercolour layer by hand. It was remarkably effective in reproducing the free and easy charm of pen and wash.

Even taking a close look at the final drawing I think that I would have assumed it was hand drawn but it raises the question of why would you wish to deny yourself the pleasure of hand-drawing all those shapes.

Talking of Photoshop tutorials, the box that I drew around my drawing was prompted by Daniel Fieske’s Gnome tutorial that I followed through the other day. As I was trying to build up tone in my drawing in the weave of the jeans, the knitting of the socks and the out of focus background, it made sense to add an edge, rather than fade out in a vignette and have the tone fade out too.

I’m  very literal when it comes to drawing and you might say well there’s no box around subjects in real life but then there aren’t outlines, stipples and cross-hatchings either. As with Fieske’s Gnome I’m actually conjuring up a little world in any sketch even when I’m following what I can see with reasonable care and attention. The frame helps suggest that this should be taken as a view into a little world (in this case a rather unappealing corner of a world occupied by my feet).

I’m sure that I’ll get launched again on my book work soon and I wish that I could keep this kind of looseness and animation going in my illustrations, which will be in pen and ink. I seem to stiffen up my style and become rather earnest and uptight when I know that I’m working for publication.

Books and Binoculars

STRAIGHT FORWARD pen and ink drawings appeal to me at the moment as I try to settle back into creative work after our home improvements and the practice I’ve been putting in to find my way around the new computer.

This time I’m testing an old bottle of Nan-King Indian Ink and it’s still free-flowing – perhaps a bit too free flowing as I spill a drop of it from an overloaded nib.

I like drawing with no end use in mind, well apart from scanning it for this online drawing journal, because I can be freer with technique; it doesn’t matter if things turn out looking a bit odd because it’s not a commission and it’s not needed for a book. A bit of hatching here, a bit of stippling there. If one side of the binoculars doesn’t work out quiet right I can experiment with the other side.

A flexible arm magnifier on the top shelf, a microscope on the bottom and the binoculars in between suggest my interest, obsession almost, for looking at the world in close up and at a distance and that’s confirmed by the books on this end of the shelf, on botany, birds and landforms.

See How They Grow

As I’ve been reorganising my shelves, I’ve been tempted to read some old natural history books recently. Books that I bought as a student 40 years ago, which I still hadn’t got around to reading. I’ve caught up on Rachel Carson’s Between the Tides and I’m currently on See How They Grow, an illustrated popular introduction to plants published in 1952 and based on a series of time lapse films on plant growth shown in cinemas. Television was only then becoming established in Britain, given a boost by the live broadcast of the coronation the previous year.

I hadn’t realised how far back natural history filmmaking went. One of the three authors of See How They Grow was F. Percy Smith.  He ‘started film work with Charles Urban in 1908 and in 1925 was engaged in making Secrets of Life and Secrets of Nature films. He always worked alone or with one assistant, using relic cameras and home-made apparatus, and published over 200 subjects varying from popular nature films to specialised technical ones. He died as a result of bombing towards the end of World War II but still has an international reputation as a master of cine-micrography.’

Link: Percy Smith, British Film Institute

Drawer

IT’S GOING to take a long time to sort out the drawers in my new plan chest if I stop to draw everything! But drawing in dip pen gives me a chance to assess which bottles of Indian Ink are worth saving. The Rohrer’s, the ink that I used for the left side of the drawing, is starting to coagulate. It’s quarter full and years old, so that’s got to go but the Calli ‘non-clgging, pigmented waterproof calligraphy ink’ is still okay. It feels more like liquid ink should and I like the spidery quality of the lines is produces.

This cutlery box was left over when we built the extension and went for a fitted kitchen many years ago but it’s just as useful for art materials.

Chemistry Stencil

The perspex stencil, in the middle section, offers a lazy way to draw flasks, tripods, Bunsen burners, Liebig condensers and alembics. It’s something my brother used at school in the 1960s, manufactured by Sterling in the USA.

Young Ted

ONE OF THE reasons that babies and toddlers appear from time to time in my sketchbook is that they’re not aware that I’m drawing them, so I can sketch away without feeling that I’m being obtrusive.

It’s my mum’s birthday today so the family have gathered from as far afield as Edinburgh, Sheffield, Hull and the flat upstairs.

As we leave, we stop to say hello to that other new member of the family, Frank the Springer Spaniel. As I’m kneeling down to make a fuss of him, I’m aware of patches of white in the periphery of my vision and I start half-thinking ‘I’m surprised that there are still a few patches of snow about’. But of course it isn’t snow, it’s snowdrops, which are at their best growing in drifts alongside the back lawn at my mum’s.

Gnome

I’M ON A LEARNING CURVE so here, after a whole morning’s work, is the finished result of the tutorial on Drawing and Illustration in Photoshop that I started yesterday evening.

My colours look alarmingly computer generated but I should point out that Daniel Fieske’s version in the step-by-step example ends up looking more like an Arthur Rackham watercolour. I should improve with experience but the point is that I’ve been able to see every stage of the process – there’s no ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’ in the tutorial; you get to see every mossy rock drawn individually – and hopefully I’ll remember a lot of the useful Photoshop tips on alpha channels, selections, layers, blend modes and shortcuts and the time-saving ways that you can conjure them up without putting down the stylus of your pen tablet.

Fieske’s thoughts on tonal values, composition and keeping a hand-drawn quality can apply equally to artwork made with natural media so I hope that following his work process in such detail will feed back into my own work.

Links: Daniel Fieske’s The Wormworld Saga includes links to video tutorials on how he created the artwork.
The tutorial that I’m following is on a DVD supplied with the Intuos 4 pen tablet, Meet the Masters by video@brain

Gnome Work

I THOUGHT that I’d finished with fairy tale characters for another year after our pantomime production of Beauty and the Beast, but no, this gnome has cropped up in a step-by-step tutorial that I’m going through to learn how to use my new pen tablet, the Intuos 4, in Photoshop CS5. It’s not the drawing that’s difficult, it’s taking on board all the tips and tricks that will save me time in the long run.

Value study; a rough sketch of tonal values.

I’ve been using Photoshop since, if I remember rightly, version 3, some 15 years ago but I’m far from being an expert, even in my limited usage of it, as I stick to what I know. Going through this tutorial is a timely way to take another look.

An example: one small detail that I sort of knew but had more or less forgotten, is that if you hold down the ‘shift’ key as you draw a line you get it perfectly horizontal or vertical.

I’m hopeless when I have to follow someone else’s instructions for doing a drawing, it’s so stultifying, but it’s a good way to learn the process.